Live sequencing, drum machine, synth, samples?

Hey so i'm jumping into this new world of electronics... need some advice.

Starting to play songs with samples behind them.. eventually want to get into more synths and even drum beats. But playing with a live drummer as well.

Other than the luxury of a nice PA with drum monitors, how else can he hear everythng to stay in tempo?

I've seen drummers in these situations wearing headphones. Are they getting a direct signal? is it that easy?

Sometimes it seems like they are playing to a metronome via samples from a laptop.

I'm sure there is a really simple answer to all this.. oh and i'm not running a laptop, but a Korg ESX 1 and eventuall more synths..

let me know what you think... thanks

i think the easiest way would be to try running all your samples out of the LEFT output of your korg, and then a click track out of the RIGHT output. plug headphones into right output.

but if you intend to eventually trigger synths and drum machines, you could get a sequencer like an MPC to trigger your korg and other stuff, then run a click track out from the mpc on one of the seperate outputs into a mixer... plug the headphones into the mixer.

that's how my band does it.

yeah i never thought about that.

so this obviously would cut the "stereo" out to run just 1 side... hmm.

thanks for the advice

p.s. - what's your band called?

you wouldn't be able to run stereo no... but playing live in a rock club you wouldn't really notice that anyway.

i mean, it's not the ideal solution, but it would work for the moment, and you wouldn't have to buy anymore gear. but yeah, if you wanted to get serious you'd need a sequencer of some kind.

my band:

www.myspace.com/sleepyeyesofdeath

i like, i bet you like m83, me too

so do you think an MPC would be an ideal live sequencer, or atleast above the Korg?

thank you for your help, really.

i haven't tried other sequencers so i can't compare them to the MPC but the MPC is really good at being the "heart" of our set up.

it syncs and triggers all our synths and drum machines, you can run a click track out on an individual output. it's a sampler so it can play samples too... it's essentially our whole band, and we'd be lost without it.

you could "play it" live, that's what's it's designed for, but we don't... we just program it and let it do it's thing.

we have the 1k. i'm not as impressed with it as a sampler, but it's interface and as a sequencer it's awesome.

and yeah, we like m83 a lot, and john carpenter, and zombi... and etc.

hey, i'm really glad you started this thread because, i'm in a band and we are just getting into the sampling stuff too. We are trying to have loops play live along with a click track for the drummer and keyboard player. We were told a very small amount about using this stuff live...basically all we know right now is that we are gonna make our loops and samples in a program and then use Digital Performer 5 to play them live. The thing we are totally confused on is that if we use the click track from digital performer and run our loops off that too how do we seperate the click so that its not heard in the blend? My only assumption is that you can assign an output for the click and a seperate one for the loops and split them like you were saying before through the korg(if i am understanding you correctly) Is that true or no??